http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Mints-a-Valuable-New-Form/130410/January 22, 2012
MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
By Kevin Carey
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things�radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.
MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations�more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.
Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together�free content and sophisticated online pedagogy��and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi�al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.
In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something�you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it.
The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputation to put its brand and credibility behind open-education resources and credentials to match. But most world-famous universities got that way through a process of exclusion. Their degrees are coveted and valuable precisely because they're expensive and hard to acquire. If an Ivy League university starts giving degrees away for free, why would everyone clamor to be admitted to an Ivy League university?
<end of excerpt>
I wonder if in the future, some bright youngsters will get certifications from MITx (or similar places), get good, intellectually challenging jobs based on these credentials, and not need to spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a B.A.
